A Summer to Be: a Memoir by the Daughter of Hamlin Garland
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A Summer to Be A Memoir by the Daughter of Hamlin Garland Isabel Garland Lord Edited and with an introduction by Keith Newlin Foreword by Victoria Doyle-Jones Copyrighted Material Contents List of Illustrations . vii Foreword, by Victoria Doyle-Jones . 1 Introduction, by Keith Newlin . 17 1. The Beginning . 30 2. Chicago . 49 3. West Salem . 61 4. Fire . 77 5. West and East . 92 6. Onteora . 115 7. England . 134 8. A Singer . 152 9. The Stage . 162 10. Marriage . 183 11. Home . 200 12. A Meeting . 222 13. Work . 236 14. Love . 247 15. Flight . 262 16. An Answer . 275 17. Christmas . 290 18. Peace . 303 19. The Journal . 319 20. Autumn . 336 21. Goodbye . 351 22. Return . 365 23. The Valley . 379 24. The End of the Trail . 394 Index . 405 Buy the book A Summer to Be A Memoir by the Daughter of Hamlin Garland Isabel Garland Lord Edited and with an introduction by Keith Newlin Foreword by Victoria Doyle-Jones Copyrighted Material List of Illustrations Isabel Garland in her twenties . frontispiece 1. Unfinished oil portrait of Isabel Garland Lord . 5 2. Constance Garland Harper and her airplane . 7 3. Don Carlos Taft . 33 4. Mary Foster Taft . 33 5. Lorado Taft in his Chicago studio . 35 6. Zulime Taft just before her marriage . 36 7. Zulime and Mary Isabel, 1903 . 40 8. Hamlin Garland and Mary Isabel . 50 9. Pen and ink drawing of Hamlin and Mary Isabel Garland . 51 10. Mapleshade, the Garland home in West Salem, Wisconsin . 63 11. Mary Isabel and Constance Garland . 67 12. Hamlin Garland in 1909 . 73 13. Richard Hayes Garland and granddaughter . 82 14. Isabel and Constance Garland, around 1920 . 116 15. Camp Neshonoc, the Garland cabin in the Catskills . 120 16. Grey Ledge, the Garland home in Onteora, New York . 121 17. Finch School graduation, 1921 . 135 18. Isabel and Hamlin Garland on the lecture platform . 163 19. Isabel Garland in medieval costume from her stage days . 165 20. Isabel and Hardesty Johnson on their wedding day . 188 21. Constance Garland Harper on her wedding day . 191 22. Constance Garland Harper around 1930 . 194 23. Illustration for Back-Trailers from the Middle Border . 202 24. Hamlin Garland in his Hollywood home . 208 25. Marguerite Namara ("Mari") in 1910 . 218 26. Mindret Lord ("Jon") . 224 Buy the book A Summer to Be A Memoir by the Daughter of Hamlin Garland Isabel Garland Lord Edited and with an introduction by Keith Newlin Foreword by Victoria Doyle-Jones Copyrighted Material 27. The Harper family . 237 28. Julanne Johnston . 272 29. Mindret Lord at the cabin by the lake . 312 30. Garland with his grandchildren . 370 31. Garland and Zulime in Hollywood . 383 Buy the book A Summer to Be A Memoir by the Daughter of Hamlin Garland Isabel Garland Lord Edited and with an introduction by Keith Newlin Foreword by Victoria Doyle-Jones Copyrighted Material Introduction Keith Newlin Readers who come to A Summer to Be because of an interest in Hamlin Garland will discover a fascinating side of the writer that he never revealed in his eight volumes of autobiography—the intensely-loving, domineering father whose deep love for his eldest daughter led him to change the trajectory of his career even as that love impeded his daughter's independence. Garland was ill- equipped by temperament for marriage and fatherhood, to which he came late, marrying in 1899 at age thirty-nine. He had spent his adulthood in almost incessant travel as he fulfilled lecture engage- ments and indulged his own wanderlust by exploring the West, by visiting the goldfields in the Yukon, and by journeying to England to meet the authors with whom he had been corresponding. As he entered his fourth decade, he found it difficult to break his solitary habits and enter the inevitable compromises of marriage and fami- ly life. Though he was a devoted father who spared no effort to ease the passage into adulthood of his two daughters, Mary Isabel, born in 1903, and Constance, born in 1907, his fatherly guidance was as often overbearing as it was loving—as Isabel (who dropped her first name in her late teens) amply illustrates in her memoir. But A Summer to Be, which Isabel had originally titled "This Loving Daughter," is valuable in its own right as a story of a girl brought up in the shadow of her father's famous friends, enjoying all the advantages of celebrity even as she rebelled against her father's loving domination. Garland had a talent for forming friendships, and in their childhood his daughters played with the Buy the book A Summer to Be A Memoir by the Daughter of Hamlin Garland Isabel Garland Lord Edited and with an introduction by Keith Newlin Foreword by Victoria Doyle-Jones Copyrighted Material 18 Keith Newlin children of Solomon Guggenheim, the founder of the famed art museum; Ira Nelson Morris, Chicago financier and later U.S. envoy to Sweden; and Ernest Thompson Seton, naturalist and co-founder of the Boy Scouts of America. As teenagers, the Garland girls met Arthur Conan Doyle, George Bernard Shaw, J. M. Barrie, Joseph Conrad, Rudyard Kipling, and A. A. Milne; and as adults they formed friendships with the actors Walter Hampden, John Barrymore, and Walter Pidgeon. While Constance inherited an artistic ability from her mother, Isabel inherited her father's talent for writing. In her memoir, which begins with her earliest memo- ries, Isabel charmingly describes her encounters with these and many other writers and actors as she honestly and movingly weaves a story of her own coming of age that is also a snapshot of American literary culture of the first decades of the twentieth cen- tury. Part memoir and part autobiography, A Summer to Be records a daughter's gradual emergence from her devoted and possessive father; it is a story full of moments of revelation and intrigue, betrayal and guilt, and ultimately the joy of self-discovery. ❧ ❧ ❧ Hamlin Garland was born in a squatters' shack on the out- skirts of the village of West Salem, Wisconsin, in 1860, just twelve years after that state had joined the Union. When he was three, his father, Richard Hayes Garland, enlisted in the Wisconsin Volunteer Infantry and saw action in Georgia during the Civil War. When Richard Garland returned to his farm in 1865 (an event celebrated in his son's much-anthologized story, "The Return of the Private"), he promptly transferred the rigor of military service to child-rais- ing. "His scheme of discipline impressed itself almost at once upon his children," Garland later remembered. When Hamlin and his younger brother, Franklin, misbehaved, "we soon learned . that the soldier's promise of punishment was swift and precise in its ful- fillment. We seldom presumed a second time on his forgetfulness or tolerance."1 His mother, the former Isabelle McClintock, was not demonstrative. Garland remembered that "she never expressed her deeper feelings. She seldom kissed her children," and once he reached his teenage years, Hamlin recalled that "she never Buy the book A Summer to Be A Memoir by the Daughter of Hamlin Garland Isabel Garland Lord Edited and with an introduction by Keith Newlin Foreword by Victoria Doyle-Jones Copyrighted Material Introduction 19 embraced us."2 The combination of a stern father and an undemon- strative mother forever colored Garland's own attitude toward the outward expression of love. As an adult, he was painfully shy about interacting with women directly; as a father, he determined not to repeat his parents' practice and never missed an opportunity to remind his children of his love—with the result that his few occa- sions of discipline deeply wounded his daughters. Richard Garland was an ambitious farmer who uprooted his family five times before Hamlin was sixteen. When the Garlands moved to a patch of land near Osage, Iowa, in 1870, young Hamlin was set to work to plow the tough prairie sod. "I plowed seventy acres of land when I was 10 years old and more each year after that," he told an interviewer in 1897. "I was so small that I had to reach up to catch the handles of the plow."3 His arms aching, at times tormented by flies or blasted by a bitter north wind, his small legs slowed by the accumulation of mud, Garland plowed two acres a day, ten hours at a stretch. It is little wonder that he later com- mented, "my heart was sometimes bitter and rebellious," even though he well understood that child labor was a necessity on a frontier farm.4 Garland's early years of hard labor would forever affect him, determine the subjects for his earliest fiction, foster his belief that nothing worthwhile comes without hard work, and engender a life-long fear of poverty. When Garland was sixteen, he entered the Cedar Valley Seminary in Osage, a combination high school and junior college, returning to the farm each spring and fall for planting and harvest- ing. By the time he graduated in 1881 at age twenty-one, he was determined to leave farm life forever, and in 1884, after a brief stint at homesteading in Dakota Territory, he made his way to Boston. Like many young men of twenty-four, he didn't know what he wanted to do with his life. For a time, he dreamed of becoming a great orator and, later, a playwright and actor. He drifted into what was effectively an adjunct position as a lecturer at the Boston School of Oratory, tried his hand at fiction-writing, and discovered his calling.